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a friend & i talked about media and stuff
me: wait speaking of random bullshit, i was thinking today about how, it's so interesting that FFXV and FFX are almost inverse plots in a lot of ways
right
like FFX is, Yuna knows the whole damn time she's a sacrifical lamb, and the party CANNOT ACCEPT THAT ("thanks tidus") so they defy all of fate to make this NOT TODAY MOTHERFUCKER
in FFXV, iirc, Noctis doesn't realize until Bahamut that he's gonna have to get sac'd? (i could be wrong on this)
(my rough wikia'ing implied that, and also implied dad knew but didn't tell him, "thanks dad")
and everyone's just like "o well guess that's the way it has to be" in the end
i mean
the entire world's about to be consumed by darkness
so i basically agree with that choice
but the two storylines communicate raaaaaadically different ideas about how The World Really Is
ffxv's being a far more conservative vision (ffxv is like, weirdly conservative on a lot of axes)
there's probably a crossover fic in there if you squint but i ain't writin' it
Friend: there is
a crossover fic there
but I agree with your general analysis
On some level, I guess the structure of the games lend themselves to opposite conclusions
FFX is a forced march towards a seemingly inexorable conclusion, the game is literally a straight line from Besaid to Sin
but your party makes a choice to save the day The Right Way (tm)
FFXV is a long, spiraling, endless series of interactions and choices and decisions
but you're stuck with one way shit Has To Go
so the analogy works even just on the gameplay level
Me: ooh yeah good point
i mean, it's p interesting to put Noctis at the core of that narrative
(this is babbling and not fully fleshed-out)
Friend: (lol : as if I'm one to judge someone else for babbling)
Me: i find him a strangely compelling this time through
er
a strangely compelling protagonist
anyway yeah like
there's something very fine-pointed about the particulars of his attitude—unlike e.g. aggressively sulky or stoic characters like Squall or Cloud, there's not an obvious "softening" that needs to happen as part of him Fulfilling His Destiny
you get the sense in a lot of ways, he grew up vaguely aware of this Necessary Purpose, but like... failed to think through the ramifications of it
like, dad's visibly wasting away in that fucking anime shit i watched
and his instinct is not "man spend more time with dad" or "think real hard about Being King", it's like
cut class and go to the arcade
lmao
which like, i am a fan of avoidance as a coping strategy, i totally get it
i guess they're going for a sort of Frankfurtian second-order freedom thing
Friend: #ER21
Me: oh right you took that class!
yeah
like storyline-wise he can't die until he's totally on board with following this shit "to the end"
i can't remember, do we get strong implications either way that his friends know that's where this is leading until like, Bahamut?
gladio spends so much time yelling at him to man up, i wonder if gladio didn't fucking realize what he was actually asking or
gladio full well realized it
and that's why all the senseless yelling
yeah that's probably the rough interestingness inflection point for noctis
he has a bunch of other interesting subleties but. yeah that one 
Friend: hrm, I guess to toss in my 0.00001BTC, I think even large chunks of the plot up until chapter 10 are a distraction
like
the whole meeting Luna to get married plot
which is framed as "This is the goal of the game, and bad things are happening to sideline it"
the game literally blows that up and says "NOPE, THAT SHIT YOU WANTED TO IGNORE IS THE SHIT YOU HAVE TO DEAL WITH"
so like, to your point, I think everyone sorta knew
but the game is one long slow motion series of conclusions to the gravity of what's at stake
Me: yup, yup
man just fucking nuking Altissia and ganking Luna was such a cool bold move storyline wise
like
handled awkwardly
but
v rad
Friend: "Handled Awkardly but Very Rad" more or less sums up a lot of my feels on the game tbh
Me: yeah that's all of FFXV
but i love it 
Friend: same
I measure the quality of a game by how long after finishing it I don't feel like playing something else
and for a solid week after FFXV
just kinda
didn't feel the need to touch my consoles
it's just this side of being kitschy
Me: haha
that's an interesting metric
i definitely have a similar (ish?) metric for evaluating books—
actually it's not super similar
but
there's two books in particular i'm thinking of, The Glass Bead Game and Runaway Horses
and both of those books, i found interesting at the time
extremely compelling in some ways
extremely flawed in others
(...okay that's why i brought them up in an FFXV convo lol)
but if i notice i'm thinking about them a lot after reading
if i find myself bringing them up like
literally years after reading them
or am compelled to go back and re-read bits as i think of them
that's honestly more impressive to me than "thing i devoured and loved and screamed about for a month"
even though like, this metric is much weirder/harder to quantify lol
and it feels exxtremely dumb to tell everyone
Friend: I actually
really really agree with this metric
Me: "HI YOU SHOULD READ RUNAWAY HORSES. IT IS ONLY OKAY. AND THE PACING IS ALL KINDS OF WEIRD. AND THE PROTAGONIST IS JUUUST THIS SIDE OF A REAL PERSON. but. but. READ IT ANYWAY"
Friend: to pick my anime of choice - that's a fucking strange ball of wax to unpack, but even when it fails, it fails interestingly
*to pick my anime of choice, Eva,
there are plenty of good or even great works that level 0 impression on me
this is generally my response to most American TV, it may be fantastic, but it's so polished and the deployment of tropes so exactly done that there's really nothing left to analyze
it's over
there's nothing left to mull over
Me: yeah, exactly
i watched a couple netflix shows a year ago because everyone was screaming about them but
i was stunned both
how quickly i could get through them
and like
how little i cared
as soon as i walked away from a TV
it was eerie
and that's probably the reason why
Friend: like you know a great counter-example - Always Sunny in Philadelphia
that show is fucking strange
and even the bad episodes are bizarre
Me: huh interesting. one of my housemates is really into that show
i might peek in next time he watches :stuck_out_tongue:
Friend: the most flattering depiction I can give it is the following - it's a cesspit of human depravity as a sitcom where the characters usually only learn to be worse as a result of their failures
Me: o.o;;;;
that is
quite the pitch
lmao
ON THAT NOTE
i am now obligated to go drink
right
like FFX is, Yuna knows the whole damn time she's a sacrifical lamb, and the party CANNOT ACCEPT THAT ("thanks tidus") so they defy all of fate to make this NOT TODAY MOTHERFUCKER
in FFXV, iirc, Noctis doesn't realize until Bahamut that he's gonna have to get sac'd? (i could be wrong on this)
(my rough wikia'ing implied that, and also implied dad knew but didn't tell him, "thanks dad")
and everyone's just like "o well guess that's the way it has to be" in the end
i mean
the entire world's about to be consumed by darkness
so i basically agree with that choice
but the two storylines communicate raaaaaadically different ideas about how The World Really Is
ffxv's being a far more conservative vision (ffxv is like, weirdly conservative on a lot of axes)
there's probably a crossover fic in there if you squint but i ain't writin' it
Friend: there is
a crossover fic there
but I agree with your general analysis
On some level, I guess the structure of the games lend themselves to opposite conclusions
FFX is a forced march towards a seemingly inexorable conclusion, the game is literally a straight line from Besaid to Sin
but your party makes a choice to save the day The Right Way (tm)
FFXV is a long, spiraling, endless series of interactions and choices and decisions
but you're stuck with one way shit Has To Go
so the analogy works even just on the gameplay level
Me: ooh yeah good point
i mean, it's p interesting to put Noctis at the core of that narrative
(this is babbling and not fully fleshed-out)
Friend: (lol : as if I'm one to judge someone else for babbling)
Me: i find him a strangely compelling this time through
er
a strangely compelling protagonist
anyway yeah like
there's something very fine-pointed about the particulars of his attitude—unlike e.g. aggressively sulky or stoic characters like Squall or Cloud, there's not an obvious "softening" that needs to happen as part of him Fulfilling His Destiny
you get the sense in a lot of ways, he grew up vaguely aware of this Necessary Purpose, but like... failed to think through the ramifications of it
like, dad's visibly wasting away in that fucking anime shit i watched
and his instinct is not "man spend more time with dad" or "think real hard about Being King", it's like
cut class and go to the arcade
lmao
which like, i am a fan of avoidance as a coping strategy, i totally get it
i guess they're going for a sort of Frankfurtian second-order freedom thing
Friend: #ER21
Me: oh right you took that class!
yeah
like storyline-wise he can't die until he's totally on board with following this shit "to the end"
i can't remember, do we get strong implications either way that his friends know that's where this is leading until like, Bahamut?
gladio spends so much time yelling at him to man up, i wonder if gladio didn't fucking realize what he was actually asking or
gladio full well realized it
and that's why all the senseless yelling
yeah that's probably the rough interestingness inflection point for noctis
he has a bunch of other interesting subleties but. yeah that one 
Friend: hrm, I guess to toss in my 0.00001BTC, I think even large chunks of the plot up until chapter 10 are a distraction
like
the whole meeting Luna to get married plot
which is framed as "This is the goal of the game, and bad things are happening to sideline it"
the game literally blows that up and says "NOPE, THAT SHIT YOU WANTED TO IGNORE IS THE SHIT YOU HAVE TO DEAL WITH"
so like, to your point, I think everyone sorta knew
but the game is one long slow motion series of conclusions to the gravity of what's at stake
Me: yup, yup
man just fucking nuking Altissia and ganking Luna was such a cool bold move storyline wise
like
handled awkwardly
but
v rad
Friend: "Handled Awkardly but Very Rad" more or less sums up a lot of my feels on the game tbh
Me: yeah that's all of FFXV
but i love it 
Friend: same
I measure the quality of a game by how long after finishing it I don't feel like playing something else
and for a solid week after FFXV
just kinda
didn't feel the need to touch my consoles
it's just this side of being kitschy
Me: haha
that's an interesting metric
i definitely have a similar (ish?) metric for evaluating books—
actually it's not super similar
but
there's two books in particular i'm thinking of, The Glass Bead Game and Runaway Horses
and both of those books, i found interesting at the time
extremely compelling in some ways
extremely flawed in others
(...okay that's why i brought them up in an FFXV convo lol)
but if i notice i'm thinking about them a lot after reading
if i find myself bringing them up like
literally years after reading them
or am compelled to go back and re-read bits as i think of them
that's honestly more impressive to me than "thing i devoured and loved and screamed about for a month"
even though like, this metric is much weirder/harder to quantify lol
and it feels exxtremely dumb to tell everyone
Friend: I actually
really really agree with this metric
Me: "HI YOU SHOULD READ RUNAWAY HORSES. IT IS ONLY OKAY. AND THE PACING IS ALL KINDS OF WEIRD. AND THE PROTAGONIST IS JUUUST THIS SIDE OF A REAL PERSON. but. but. READ IT ANYWAY"
Friend: to pick my anime of choice - that's a fucking strange ball of wax to unpack, but even when it fails, it fails interestingly
*to pick my anime of choice, Eva,
there are plenty of good or even great works that level 0 impression on me
this is generally my response to most American TV, it may be fantastic, but it's so polished and the deployment of tropes so exactly done that there's really nothing left to analyze
it's over
there's nothing left to mull over
Me: yeah, exactly
i watched a couple netflix shows a year ago because everyone was screaming about them but
i was stunned both
how quickly i could get through them
and like
how little i cared
as soon as i walked away from a TV
it was eerie
and that's probably the reason why
Friend: like you know a great counter-example - Always Sunny in Philadelphia
that show is fucking strange
and even the bad episodes are bizarre
Me: huh interesting. one of my housemates is really into that show
i might peek in next time he watches :stuck_out_tongue:
Friend: the most flattering depiction I can give it is the following - it's a cesspit of human depravity as a sitcom where the characters usually only learn to be worse as a result of their failures
Me: o.o;;;;
that is
quite the pitch
lmao
ON THAT NOTE
i am now obligated to go drink